I used to feel this way and I understand where you are coming from. You are right in the sense that people providing huge benefit to society should definitely be compensated to a greater extent than a person that contributes nothing.
The problem is that in an ideal situation, two things will happen: 1) human labor will be replaced by technology and 2) human population will increase with technology. Both trends will leave us with a society where there isn't enough work to occupy 40 hours per week for each person.
As we move closer to this 'utopia', I think it makes sense as a society to decide on a basic standard of living and provide that for every person while having additional lifestyle benefits for those that contribute to society.
It will also help if we move towards more employees working for fewer hours, so we all have more free time and more people have employment.
Obviously, the implementation of something like this is extremely hard and will probably create problems, but I think it is the ideal future situation. Additionally, to implement this type of society, it will require some level of 'redistribution'.
Regardless of whether or not this happened, it's scary because I actually find it plausible. Similar themes have appeared across countless headlines over the last few months and if we aren't already here, we soon will be. The sad part is that like all such power struggles, things are not going to change before a lot of bad things happen.
Agree 100%. This article is especially funny because the author's startup is Followgen. While a twitter app that automates social interactions may be a useful tool and a great thing to work on, it really isn't changing the world.
Could "changing the world" be a contender the most trite, overused expression of 2013? Recent grads seem to have adopted it en masse as their personal tagline. It's a nice sentiment, but it hard not to roll your eyes when every 23 year old applies it to his mobile phone app with no users that he threw together in a couple weeks.
I'd suggest actually changing the world first, and then shouting it from the rooftops. It will be (slightly) less annoying that way.
You should join my startup as chief growth hacker. We'll pay you less than you're currently making, but you'll change the way people are changing the world.
Worse, by working on a trivial startup that will eventually fail, they'll usually be changing the world for the worse, as the opportunity cost could be going into medical research, or fundamental science, or creating other great works that move society forward.
I completely agree with you. I'm in my lower 20s and you have no idea how annoying that phrase is to me. I hear it way too much and used with reckless abandon that it's lost all meaning to me.
OP and Followgen founder here. As someone below points out, the article is a satire of SG - I absolutely realize that Followgen isn't changing the world!
I'm afraid it didn't quite read as satire to me. If the ending was trying to be over-the-top, it undershot the target. Oh, if only the idea of an SG writing something so obnoxious on his personal blog were obviously satire.
The effect isn't bad, though, so rather than destroy the tone with an even more over-the-top ending (characters stabbing each other with forks?) I'd probably try a different "literary" signal. Consider, for example, a one-sentence intro to establish the narrator slightly more explicitly as a third character: "While I was dining at Madera, I overheard a conversation:"
Or, maybe you have the Andy Kaufman nature and you just don't care what people think so long as the art is working. ;)
To me, the point that made me stop and think whether it was satire or not (as I assumed it was from all prior content) was the beginning of the last paragraph, where it feels like it switches from third person to first person. Instead of "Worst of all, ..." if it said "Worst of all, SG believes..." (or something similar) it may have kept the satirical tone better.
I think that's the point. The author sees himself as PIH. He doesn't care about changing the world and sees SG as silly. The article is a satire of Startup Guy.
I once worked on a document management/project management system, the devs were first port of call for the client IT teams.
Boring, right? Non-game changing?
One phone call I got just after it was installed at a 15-20 person business. I'd helped them out with something and asked how the roll-out was going:
Client: "Yeah, it's great, we're loving it. Bit of a problem though..."
Me: "Oh right, well maybe I can help you out, what is it?"
Client: "We don't know what to do with Sue and Bill now, they don't have any work to do. What can we get them doing?"
This boring, non-game changing software had automated roughly 10% of their workforce. Obviously not great for Sue and Bill, but when you put it in those terms the cost savings across all the clients we were serving must have been 10s of millions of pounds. That's millions of pounds to be spent on actually building things instead of just faffing around with admin stuff making sure the subcontractors got the right diagram, or finding out what the site foreman's phone number was.
Even the silliest auto-tweet tagging software means you can do more with less, that's why people buy them.
Almost all software is game changing. Never doubt we are all changing the world. It's just that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. What Google did back in the 90s is almost laughably simple to what most of us do today. But obviously what they do now is much more complex.
No sarcasm, I think it's true. I'm talking about the original search engine, not what they've done to it since. They've done amazing things to it since and it's obviously turned into an arms race, but we all build much more complex software today than we did 20 years ago.
Better tools, better practices, better understanding of what works and what doesn't, better resources online.
Even simple things like most people these days understand how HTTP actually works, back then you'd be lucky to find people who even understood basic HTML.
Did you use Google back then? It wasn't actually that great, you might have to do a bunch of searches, try excluding words, just to get some vaguely good results. It was a lot better than the rest though.
a good and fast search algorithm for a massive database across dozens of machines isnt a trivial thing even today if you build it from scratch. In the 90ies their algorithms were world class!
Google's results were orders of magnitude better, in my opinion. I don't remember how it compares to today, frankly, but I remember the tears of joy I shed at the time.
I think I switched from using a combination of altavista & one of the search sites that combined a lot of different results.
It was better, but I can't remember thinking it wasn't orders of magnitude better. I didn't use it once and think 'oh my god, this is perfect'. It was a gradual switch. And to begin with the thing which made me use it more was the simple UI.
Really, it wasn't that much better, at least not to me at the time. I'd switch search engines every few months, or more accurately have 3 or 4 search engines to deploy against difficult queries.
Google was _slightly_ better than alltheweb.com at the time that I added it into the mix. But it slowly began to win more and more of the "query requires using 4 search engines" contests and eventually I only used one.
I don't want this to sound like an anti-corporation rant, but I think that most automated workers have a hard time moving across fields and that the money "saved" is often not benefiting the company but the owners of the said company. While paying people to fool around is certainly not right either, automation of the working class widens the income disparity gap
Ah, yes, maximizing profit for the owners at the expense of laborers. This has never happened before. I'll argue that the money saved could also be used to fund further automation of the labor that is one of their largest annual expenses.
Typically when people espouse the want to "change the world" it is for the betterment of humanity; though it is interesting that you identify with the sentiment.
It depends on what you mean by changing the world. For instance. The MS team working on Microsoft word upgrades doesn't change the world in a meaningful way, when was the last time you heard "Now MS Word has feature X, my life is saved, my children are healthier."
Meanwhile, I know two brothers who from a simple YouTube channel (not even devs) whose followers have topped the Kiva loan program, raised millions and millions of dollars for charities around the world, are actively educating people of all ages about history, literature, current events and science. One of the brothers has made the New York Best Sellers List in young adult fiction with a book about the struggles of cancer. With less capital they are decreasing world suck more than MS Word development team.
So, what about apps and web apps? A really cool childrens book that is interactive and encourages kids to read or learn about a cool and important topic, I would argue, will have greater net value than Angry Birds even if the audience is smaller. An app designed for companies (like electric companies) to use, that forecasts weather conditions that aren't storm conditions but are more severe than the company can operate saves lives, while the market is small. I'd argue saving even one life or helping teach one child how to read is changing the world in a big way.
Not directed at you, but I wonder how many times using the phrase "Changing the world" is thrown about from the insecurity of not being able to change ourselves for the better, first, by even submitting to solving smaller problems well, and maybe, like moving up.
Hence the dig in the final sentence about "exploiting a narrow arbitrage opportunity." Knowing the author's work really changes how that sentence is read.
If he's working on something that he enjoys and can get paid enough to enjoy his life, that's a better world than one where people can only make a living off watching life fade away while sitting in a cubicle without time to family, friends, non-profit work, etc.
I think it's larger than you think. I don't hang out with many developers and I know a guy who fits this mold. That's 1 out of the maybe 500-1000 acquaintances I have who are generally of above average intelligence/education.
Sounds like jealousy. If you can automate the way you get money, you have 23 hrs and 40 minutes a day to do something without any profit motive for true good. Startups, business, and making money don't have to be a religion.
Bill Gates will do more good with the money he made than he did by creating software.
I think what he's saying is that all seven billion of us benefited from the PC revolution, where the bottom one billion may benefit (or may not) from Gates' efforts.
It's an interesting ethical question. As with most questions, I don't know the answer to it.
Exactly. Also indirect effects, like how much more productive are cancer researchers thanks to computers. Very hard to underestimate the importance of computers.
The problem is that in an ideal situation, two things will happen: 1) human labor will be replaced by technology and 2) human population will increase with technology. Both trends will leave us with a society where there isn't enough work to occupy 40 hours per week for each person.
As we move closer to this 'utopia', I think it makes sense as a society to decide on a basic standard of living and provide that for every person while having additional lifestyle benefits for those that contribute to society.
It will also help if we move towards more employees working for fewer hours, so we all have more free time and more people have employment.
Obviously, the implementation of something like this is extremely hard and will probably create problems, but I think it is the ideal future situation. Additionally, to implement this type of society, it will require some level of 'redistribution'.